


A Children's Tale (The Lonesome Wail)

by Kidd_you_not



Series: The Thousand Mile Night [1]
Category: The Long Dark (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Isolation, Pleasant Valley, Starvation, a lone person trying to survive in the canadian wilderness, it goes as well as expected, minor depression, surprise dogs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2021-01-04 11:37:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21197048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kidd_you_not/pseuds/Kidd_you_not
Summary: She's back because she hasn't eaten more than a few hundred calories per day in almost a week. Her hands are shaking, her mind is fuzzy and this is the last location that could possibly have any hidden food stashes. She wants to leave and go live elsewhere but she knows she won't make the journey without sizeable food reserves. She should have done it sooner, stupid woman.It's when she's trudging through the snow towards Thompson's Creek, her head down and mind elsewhere, that she sees a streak of dark fur at the edge of her vision.Stupid, stupid, stupid, she curses herself. Not paying attention can cost your life in less than a second.What she sees, however, is not a wolf or a bear that managed to sneak up on her.It's... a dog?





	A Children's Tale (The Lonesome Wail)

**Author's Note:**

> Song title from First Aid Kit's 'The Lions Roar' a.k.a the game's introsong.

It's been 25 days, ten hours and a bit since Cora has seen another living being that doesn't fall into the prey/predator categories. It's been five days since the rest of her canned food, meant to last two weeks and ended up lasting three, ran out. It was yesterday when she ate the last remaining protein bar. Her stomach, so used to never being full, has stopped its incessant growling.

She's given up on being rescued. After so long, it's clear that no one is coming to help, to investigate the plane crash. To look for survivors. No one's coming to get Cora out of the situation she quite unexpectedly landed in. And that seems weird, doesn't it? She remembers sending out a distress call as soon as she realised what was happening, but almost a month after the incident and still... nothing.

In her first days in this desolate valley, it was easy to tell herself that 'yes, help is coming, stay near the crash site', 'no, don't leave, or you will miss them' and most of all 'yes, you can see houses, but no, their inhabitants must have gone away for the winter, that's why you don't hear cars or see light in any of the windows'. It has stopped being easy not too long after.

So she started exploring. She stayed near the radio tower, near the crash site so that when emergency services finally arrived, they'd find her immediately. Sitting around inside all day, nursing a deep cut in her side, became boring fast so out she went. And it was a mistake. Oh, boy, was it a mistake. She may not have found another human being, but she found wolves. Many, _many_ wolves that kind of chased her back inside. So only days after crashing her plane in rural Great Bear, she was trapped inside a radio station, was rapidly running out of snacks saved from her downed plane and in addition to suffering from blood loss and fever from almost gutting herself with sharp scraps of what used to be her favourite vehicle, she had also twisted her ankle while scampering up the hill fleeing from a thing with seemingly more teeth that it had hair on its body.

Hunger made her go out again not even two days later. "Help isn't coming and starvation is not the way I wanna go," she decided. So she grabbed a wooden chair leg, planning to use it as a makeshift club, and snuck outside and to her broken plane. At least it hadn't burned out completely. Trying to keep her eyes peeled for any wolves close or in the distance, she rounded the steel hull and there. The ripped open flank where a large rock must have dug its way in. It pained her to see her baby like this, but it didn't keep her from noticing that the jagged edges of the cut didn't look unlike the wolf teeth she came worryingly close to less than two days ago.

Now, plane steel isn't exactly made to be easy to bend and break, so Cora's hope of finding or breaking of a piece to use as an improvised knife could have been for naught, but lo and behold, after a thorough search, she found a fragment light enough to carry, thin enough to wrap her hand around and with a sharp enough edge that with a bit of tweaking, she could form it into a blade without much fuss.

By the end of her search she was panting, sweating and her ankle and side hurt more than was probably healthy. Now, if only she could find some food. She had nothing left at the radio tower and she was in absolutely no condition to go and look for some elsewhere, especially when considering all the local wildlife. She was aware that finding a useful tool today could not be attributed to anything but dumb luck and who knew how long that was going to last. It would, however, hold out for at least a couple more hours, as it turned out.

It happened when Cora was hurriedly making her way back to the tower that she heard the scream. More like a shrill shrieking. She dropped immediately into a crouch, gripping her knife tightly in front of her. A sharp bark came from the same direction and she flinched, her heart hammering in her chest, her breath coming short and painful and too fucking loud. She looked around wildly but there was... nothing. She was almost home, crouched between two large boulders, which seemed like a bad place to be staying still - not enough room to run. And being hidden out of sight doesn't really stop wolves for long anyway. And still nothing. No black wall of fur bursting around the stone to take her out of her misery, not even another sound. She breathed out and loosened the grip she had on her scrap of metal. It stung and she winced. The edge she was holding was less sharp than the tip but definitely sharp enough to cut when gripped too tightly. She had to do something about that.

She wanted to go back inside, slam the door and hide from whatever is out there but that scream... it had sounded weirdly human. Not quite but close enough for her unprepared ears. And maybe... If there was another human being around here they could help each other, could ensure each other's survival. It could be a child from all she knew and in that case, she couldn't lose any more time. So, investigate it was.

Slowly, she crept out of her hiding spot and tried to orient herself. Now, where had the sounds come from? She walked a few careful steps, keeping quite because no matter what had just happened, there definitely was a wolf close by. She kept going, keeping her ears open until-

There. The sound of, well. It must have been eating. And not the pretty kind. The forest wasn't very thick here, but she still had to take a step to the side to finally see what she had been looking for. A wolf, of course. And in his maw, luckily not a human, because there was no way Cora could have saved them in any way. The unlucky rabbit, however, had already disappeared somewhere Cora would love to never get too close to, thank you very much.

The wolf hadn't noticed her yet and as she started turning around to go back home and to safety, she paused. An irrational bout of food envy came over her. She hadn't eaten all day and barely at all in the days before. She hadn't thought she'd have been here for long, so she had kind of messed up the rations. She had eaten too much in the beginning, leaving herself without anything now. She knew her hands were shaking slightly and that she got dizzy whenever she moved too quickly, be it from her injuries, the pain or malnutrition. So going back might not solve a thing, might only result in her getting even weaker and not having the energy to go out tomorrow to find sustenance. So...

She stayed put and re-evaluated. She was hungry. She was alone. There was no one coming to help or provide. She had to survive on her own. She was hungry. She had a knife. There was a wolf standing not even twenty feet in front of her, obliviously eating a perfectly dead rabbit. The rabbit was almost gone. And she was _so_ hungry. She might miss her chance. That last aspect kind of decided it for her. Now or never.

She gripped the knife tight enough it hurt. Again. Gritting her teeth, she moved towards her target, trying to tread as lightly as possible. The club was in her other hand. Carefully, so carefully, she walked towards the wolf, keeping out of direct line of sight. It was no use. Its head snapped up and a deep, rumbling growl made her freeze in her step. So much for a surprise attack. She held her breath. The wolf kept growling and when it realised that she wasn't going to back off like it wanted, it snarled, stoop up from its crouch and took a step towards her.

Cora was cursing internally, cursing herself, her plane and everything leading up to a situation in which she had to face off against a _fucking_ wolf, injured and tired and hungry as she was, with nothing but a sharp piece of metal and no protective gear whatsoever. Clearly, the wolf wasn't too worried about her either, indicated by how it was now slowly stalking towards her. And Cora -

  
Cora couldn't move. Couldn't turn around and run, couldn't move to attack the wolf, couldn't do anything but stand frozen, stare and panic. Because how the hell was she gonna survive this?

  
In the end, it was the wolf who ended the stalemate by snapping its teeth and charging at her so fast his movements blurred in front of her eyes and before she could gather any kind of thought she was on her back with what must be more than 50 kilos of furry death on her chest, trying to bite her face off. She had her left arm against its chest, barely holding it back and in her right hand the knife. She didn't know what to do, where to stab, didn't think about actually killing an animal; at this precise moment, she was all instinct. And instinct commanded her to survive and survive by any means necessary.

So she didn't think when she drove the knife upwards and into the beast, too focused on keeping her face of the range of those teeth, didn't feel the way the skin broke, didn't feel when the knife glanced off what must have been a rib and went into the flesh of the wolf's chest. She would remember later and shudder but at that moment the only thing that mattered was that the wolf backed off, flinching away from the pain. The scrap was almost wrenched out of her hand but she held on and ripped it out in one brutal tug. The wolf yelped again. It was stumbling but she was still on her back in a seemingly defenceless position and they both knew it.

It growled again, started moving towards her once more but she still had the knife, still had the club and she was faster this time. She sat back up, gripped the wooden chair leg in both hands and swung it like a bat. Now, she had never played baseball in her life but finesse wasn't required when you were trying to bash someone's head in. It caught the wolf in the side of the head, close to its ear and it reared back, whimpering pitifully. Cora jumped up, and thinking that wolves were all about dominance and intimidation, she squared her shoulders, adopted the broadest stance she could think of and raised the bat again, stomping towards the wolf.

And somehow, it worked. The wolf turned and fled with its tail between its legs and Cora... dropped. Adrenaline was still coursing through her but she knew that high wasn't going to last long. The struggle couldn't have taken longer than ten seconds but she was panting, sweating and sore. Only when she looked down did she realised that she had another problem.

Her front was shredded. Her clothes were hanging in tatters and beneath them, she could see blood welling up from hopefully not too deep scratches. She couldn't feel it. Neither the scratches on her chest nor the bite on her left forearm. When had that happened? She couldn't say, her head wasn't really clear enough to sort out the memories. She jerked upright. She was crashing, and fast. And she still had to get the rabbit, make it back to the cabin, patch herself up and try to do something with the leftover meat. She wasn't looking forward to it. Having grown up with pre-packaged food, skinning and gutting a rabbit, let alone cook it, seemed a little terrifying. But she figured that as long as she didn't throw any of it back up, she had a chance. She didn't have the slightest idea of how to cook rabbit, especially rabbit that had been chewed on by a wolf. She made the executive decision to boil the shit out of that thing no matter what, forced herself back to her feet and went to get the bloody heap of what was hopefully going to be her dinner.

She knew it was still dim. She still didn't have enough food to fill her belly, help probably wouldn't come, she had more injuries than she could bother counting right now and she should really start worrying about her medical supply on top of her food problems, but for today, she was good. She wasn't far from the tower and safety, she would patch herself up and eat and hydrate before finally getting to sleep, because let's face it, if she skipped food and water and gave in to her exhaustion, she wasn't gonna make it out of bed again.

And tomorrow, she was going to find the wolf. Or what was left of it.

That happened about 20 days ago. Sometimes, she thinks back and wonders if she should have just given up. Let herself be killed by that first wolf, a sudden, rather painless death. Now, it feels like it's too late. It's too late to give up, to make almost a month of struggle pointless. If she did, there'd be no justifying the things she's done.

She's outside again, the weather is miserable. They have that in common. She hasn't seen a living human being since before she crashed. A lot of dead ones, though. She doesn't know how long she can keep clinging to hope. Hope, that she finds someone alive or that she's rescued after all. Hope, that her food supply doesn't run out before that happens. It's not looking good on that front, hence her being outside. Today, she's on her way to the mini-mart in Thompson's Creek, a very small mining town. When she first found it, she was ecstatic. Food, clothes and the prospect of other people. Of course, those all turned out to be dead, like the others. But she found a great coat and food to last her a week.

Now she's back because she hasn't eaten more than a few hundred calories a day for almost a week. Her hands are trembling, her mind is fuzzy and this is the last location that could possibly have any hidden food stashes. She's checked every other place. She wants to leave and go live elsewhere but she knows she won't make the journey without sizeable food reserves. She should have done it sooner, stupid woman. But it had taken so long to search the valley, to maybe find someone who survived whatever happened. She still doesn't know. Only knows that the electricity is gone, that animals are behaving weirdly and that everyone is fucking dead.

It's when she's trudging through the snow towards Thompson's Creek, her head down and mind elsewhere, that she sees a streak of dark fur at the edge of her vision. She whirls around, stumbles and fumbles out the hunting knife she found besides the frozen body of a mountain climber. _Stupid, stupid, stupid_, she curses herself. Not paying attention can cost your life in less than a second. She's been on the giving and receiving end of that more than once.

What she sees, however, is not a wolf or a bear that managed to sneak up on her. It's... a dog? Crouching in the leafless bushes of what might have been a rose once upon a time, it watches her warily. She watches back.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this, I'm on tumblr under @kidd-you-not  
I'm kinda new to this, so you might not find a lot there.


End file.
